NASA Lunar Gateway Program
Solstar Gateway Communications Node
Solstar Gateway Communications Node
Technical Program Manager
Lead Systems engineer
Blue Origin Heritage Integration
ICD and INterface Leadership
DeEp Space Hardware Strategy
Project Overview / MIssion Objectives
As NASA prepares to return to the Moon through the Artemis program, the Lunar Gateway will serve as a critical infrastructure hub—supporting science, logistics, and crewed missions in cislunar space. But for that to work, it needs real-time, robust, and extensible data connectivity.
Solstar Space Company was selected to prototype a Wi-Fi–based Data Relay Node for the Gateway’s communications backbone. Building on its prior claim as the first company to deploy Wi-Fi in space—with a successful demonstration aboard a Blue Origin suborbital flight—Solstar aimed to deliver a modular, flight-like system capable of operating in lunar orbit.
The goal: prove that commercial Wi-Fi protocols, properly hardened, could enable persistent data services between spacecraft, Gateway modules, and Earth. The system had to be compact, low-power, and radiation-tolerant, yet capable of handling demanding communications workloads in deep space.
Roles and Responsibilities
I served as both the Technical Program Manager and Lead Systems Engineer for Solstar’s Gateway Wi-Fi Relay Node. In this dual role, I was responsible not only for the system architecture and hardware design, but also for aligning technical execution with program milestones, stakeholder requirements, and NASA Gateway integration targets.
My responsibilities included:
Defining the electrical and systems architecture of the node, including power, RF, and data subsystems
Managing design schedules, team coordination, and NASA interface deliverables as Technical PM
Leading hardware selection, grounding strategy, and harness design to meet deep space environmental constraints
Supporting integration of commercial Wi-Fi protocols into a flight-capable form factor
Bridging communications between Solstar’s internal software, hardware, and external NASA teams
This role required not only deep technical fluency, but also leadership discipline—balancing stakeholder expectations, shifting requirements, and the real-world constraints of building a deep space comms system on a startup’s timeline.
Legacy
The Gateway Relay Node stands as one of the first commercially-developed Wi-Fi–based communications systems designed for cislunar orbit. My leadership helped take the project from conceptual sketch to bench-tested prototype, proving that commercial tech, if properly architected, can meet the demands of lunar infrastructure.
As both engineer and program manager, I helped establish the groundwork for future flight-class nodes and modular comms infrastructure that could one day serve Artemis astronauts, lunar rovers, and orbiting science payloads.
